LIFE magazine was a large, coffee-table magazine known for its dramatic photography and massive national circulation from 1883 to 2000. It was an omnipresent fixture on just about every coffee table in every living room in the United States when I was a child. The June 25, 1951 issue is of particular interest for students of somatic psychology because it carried a long article about the then “new” Constitutional Psychology and somatotyping system of William Sheldon (1898-1977) (Coughlan, 1951).
For those unfamiliar with Sheldon and Constitutional Psychology, it was the first body-based psychology proposing that one’s physical form or physique affected one’s temperament or personality. To prove this notion, Sheldon developed an anthropometric measurement system with which he formulated a tri-polar body taxonomic system of 777 variations. He and his research partners measured more than 46,000 men between the ages of 18 and 65 over a 20-year period. Measurements yielded a three-way distribution based on height and build. Sheldon found three distinct body types he called endomorph, ectomorph, and mesomorph. He theorized, as had several constitutional researchers before him, that the three body types originated from the three primal tissue layers of the endoderm, ectoderm, and mesoderm. The endomorph is short and heavy. The ectomorph is tall and skinny. The mesomorph is muscular. All subjects were then assigned a 3-digit number indicating the degree to which they possessed qualities of the three types. A 1-1-7 is a body type is completely ectomorphic while a 7-1-1 is a pure endomorph and 1-7-1 denotes a pure mesomorph. Sheldon speculated that there were 347 body types possible, but he himself had only confirmed 76. He thought of each number as a kind of “biological identification card” (Sheldon, 1954). Sheldon then undertook the in-depth, psychological study of 33 male subjects over a five-year period. The subjects were both students and instructors at the university. Body measurements were taken and then each subject underwent a series of 20 in-depth, psychoanalytic interviews. The researchers found 78 personality traits that clustered around the three somatotypes as three distinct temperaments or personality types (Sheldon, Stevens, & Tucker, 1940).
Sheldon was not the first theorist to propose a trichotomy of short-fat, average-muscular, and tall-thin. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries, the humoural body types were popular in France and Léon Rostan (1790-1866), a French medical doctor, proposed three fundamental body types in 1828: type digestif, type musculaire, and type cerebrale (Carter & Heath, 1990); in fact, the same distinctions can also be found in the American phrenology literature. Nor was Sheldon the first or only researcher to use somatotyping measurements in relation to personality patterns. A similar division was used in American phrenology in the 1860s: Motive Temperament (mesomorph), Vital Temperament (endomorph), Mental Temperament (ectomorph) (Wells, 1874).
Measure Your Temperament
The LIFE magazine story discussed the personality profiles of the three somatotypes and includes a self-questionnaire to help the reader ascertain his or her somatotype based on appearance and typical behaviors. Care to take the test?
THE ENDOMORPH
- Is relaxed in posture and movement.
- Loves physical comfort. Devotes himself to the “nice things in life.”
- Loves to eat. Talks and thinks a great deal about food.
- Has slow physical, mental, and emotional reactions.
- Likes to have friends or lots of people around during meals.
- Is happiest when simply digesting a good meal.
- Likes tradition, ceremony and ritual and doing things the “right way.”
- Hates to be alone.
- Is indiscriminately amiable toward everybody and everything.
- Is g reedy for the affection and approval of others.
- Is gossipy and curious. Knows things about others and their relationships.
- Has an even, harmonious disposition.
- Is tolerant. Doesn’t want conflict.
- Is complacent and often rather smug and self-satisfied.
- Is hard to excite or arouse in any way.
- Goes to sleep easily. Sleep deeply and long.
- Openly shows his emotions.
- Becomes more relaxed and amiable when drinking.
- Always seeks out others for companionship when upset.
- Clings to family and childhood friends.
THE MESOMORPH
- Unhesitating in posture and movement.
- Loves physical adventure and activity.
- Is full of energy and seems almost tireless.
- Needs and enjoys regular physical workouts.
- Likes to dominate people and situations. Likes to have power.
- Is a risk-taker and often reckless.
- Is very direct.
- Is physically courageous. Makes a good warrior. Likes combat.
- Likes to compete with others both physically and in business.
- Is callous and insensitive to the needs or feelings of others.
- Prone to claustrophobia. Hates being physically held back.
- Good worker and achiever although often in a ruthless manner.
- Strong voice that projects well.
- Is relatively insensitive to pain.
- Actions are vigorous and often noisy.
- Matures early and seems old for his or her age.
- Very extroverted and objective, but lacks self-awareness and self-doubt.
- Becomes more aggressive when drinking.
- Seeks action when upset. Likes to keep busy.
- Idealizes youth and all things youthful.
THE ECTOMORPH
- Tight and restrained in posture and movement.
- Overly-quick physiological responses. Strong, immediate reactions to illness, injuries, and emotional upsets.
- Fast social reactions. Awkward and easily embarrassed.
- Loves being alone.
- Alert, attentive, and often anxious.
- Has a poker-face when it comes to emotions. Neutral, expressionless, mask-like.
- Body and eye movements very self-conscious.
- Dislikes socializing and meeting new people.
- Lacking in poise and self-confidence.
- Dislikes habits and routines.
- Likes small, enclosed “cozy” spaces.
- Tends to be unpredictable.
- Restrained voice.
- Very sensitive to pain.
- Poor sleeper, but doesn’t like getting up.
- Appears younger than his or her years.
- Self-absorbed.
- Dislikes alcohol and resistant to its effects.
- Seeks solitude when upset.
- Believes happiness comes later in life.
Most people are a mixture of types, however, but tend to gravitate to one or another so such an armchair test as this is all for general interest and self-amusement purposes. The interested reader is referred to Saltus (1986) for more detailed variations of the three types. The point here is that Sheldon’s system is empirically valid to a degree and still quite practical. So why did it fail to take hold?
William Sheldon: Controversial Father of Body Psychology
William Sheldon (1898-1977)
Photo courtesy of the American Numismatic Association
Sheldon plays such a gigantic role in the development of the modern exogenous approach to body psychology that a biographical profile is needed. He was born in 1898 in Warwick, Rhode Island and Williams James (1842-1910) was his godfather. He was vividly interested in nature as a child and worked as a state ornithologist when he was 10-years-old. He received both his MD and Ph.D. A two-year fellowship in Europe enabled him to study with Carl Jung (1875-1961) and meet Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Ernst Kretschmer (1988-1964). Kretschmer developed his own somatotyping system based on hormone content and psychopathological diagnosis. Sheldon invented somatotyping—a classification of variations in human body structure—and then connected body shapes to temperament, physical and mental illness, and patterns of growth and ageing. He wrote Varieties of Human Physique (1940), Varieties of Human Temperament (1942), Varieties of Delinquent Youth (1949) and Atlas of Men (1954). An Atlas of Women based on thousands of photos of Vassar College undergraduates was never issued. He was affiliated over the course of his career with the Universities of Texas, Wisconsin, Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, the University of Oregon medical school, and the U.S. Army Medical School.
Sheldon and his work suffered from bad historical timing and a bad personality. He started his career at the peak of the American Eugenics movement and began publishing at the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party with its Nuremberg racial laws and eventual genocide program. Sheldon’s work centered on the relationship of physique and personality. He found a close relationship between the two with correlations consistently as high as .80 and herein lies a problem. Such high correlations are not typically found in social science research. Later researchers did replicate Sheldon’s findings, but at much lower levels of correlation as in the .30 range. Therefore, there is some kind of systematic bias in Sheldon’s analyses. Next, Sheldon’s system is not a theory of psychology, but a biological taxonomy of human form (Lindzey, 1973). Those who knew him well remember him as being stubborn, temperamental, argumentative, prejudiced against all those not of Anglo-Saxon heritage, and engaged in skewing his data results. This muddies the waters considerably regarding his work. His equating of physique with destiny during World War II combined with his sympathies for Nazi eugenics made him increasingly toxic. The death blow was dealt by his former assistant, Barbara Honeyman Heath (1910-1988). She denounced his methods as fraudulent while she herself went on to a successful career using her own modified version of the Sheldon measurement system (Vertinksky, 2007). Somatotyping has survived over the years with limited and exclusive application in the area of sport to determine the best body type for any given sport. It is now known as sports anthropometry and does not address personality factors (Carter & Honeyman-Heath, 1990). Sadly, the problem of connecting body type to personality remains unanswered (Ryckman, 2008).
In Closing
There are so many interesting things about this LIFE magazine article. Certainly, it catches Sheldon in his heyday in establishing Constitutional Psychology—a heyday which did not last very long—and put he and his work on the national stage. It turns the essentials of the somatotype profiles into kind of parlor game, but this is okay because it was a superb vehicle for communicating essential ideas to the general public. The article itself goes into more detail on each type and after all these years still makes for good reading. It is remarkable as kind of manifesto for the masses on how physique affects personality; a very radical idea in an era when Behaviorism and social conditioning was at its zenith in both academia and business. Too bad this was the first and only salvo from Constitutional Psychology. It soon faded from the psychology books after the late 1970s and so marked the end of the first human biological taxonomy and body-based psychology in America. But, the three somatic categories are still alive and their usefulness yet lives on just waiting rediscovery.
Paul Shane, Ph.D., LMT
Director, Academic Content
References
Carter, J. & Honeyman-Heath, B. (1990). Somatotyping: Development and Applications. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Coughlan, R. (1951). What manner of morph are you? LIFE (June 25), p. 65-79.
Lindzey, G. (1973). Morphology and behavior. In G. Lindzey, C. Hall, & M. Manosevitz (Eds.), Theories of Personality: Primary Sources and Research, New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., pp. 280-292.
Ryckman, R. (2008). Theories of Personality. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Saltus, C. (1986). Bodyscopes: The Revealing Link Between Body Type and Personality. New York, NY: Bantam.
Sheldon, W. (1954). Atlas of Men: A Guide for Somatotyping the Adult Male at All Ages. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers.
Sheldon, W., Hartl, E., & McDermott, E. (1949). Varieties of Delinquent Youth: An Introduction to Constitutional Psychiatry. New York, NY: Harper and Brothers.
Sheldon, W., Stevens, S., & Tucker, W. (1940). The Varieties of Human Physique: An Introduction to Constitutional Psychology. New York, NY: Harper and Brothers.
Sheldon, W. & Stevens, S. (1942). The Varieties of Human Temperament: A Psychology of Constitutional Differences. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers.
Vertinsky, P. (2007). Physique as destiny: William H. Sheldon, Barbara Honeyman Heath and the struggle for hegemony in the science of somatotyping. Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 24(2), p. 291-316.
Wells, S. (1874). How To Read Character: New Illustrated Hand-Book of Phrenology and Physiognomy for Students and Examiners; With A Descriptive Chart. New York, NY: Samuel R. Wells Publisher.